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Technology’s Impact on Mathematics: An Interview With John Holden
Sarah Horowitz
Robert Johnson Holden Jr.
Mr. David Brandt
February 11, 2014
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Table of Contents
Interviewer Release Form...... 3
Interviewee Release Form...... 4
Statement of Purpose...... 5
Biography...... 6
Historical Contextualization...... 8
Interview Transcription...... 17
Interview Analysis...... 68
Works Consulted...... 72
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Statement of Purpose
The purpose of the oral history of John Holden is to examine the way teaching has changed over the course of Mr. Holden's lifetime. During the 1970’s, when Mr. Holden started teaching, and shortly thereafter, academic success was seen as important.
Therefore, many advances in teaching occurred. The interview with Mr. Holden provides readers with an understanding of how education has changed and become more effective.
Mr. Holden’s recollection of the past forty years as an educator helps lead to the realization of the improvements in education, illustrating how drastically education has changed in order to adapt to the needs of all students.
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Biography
Robert Johnson Holden Jr. was born in 1949 in New Bedford, Massachusetts. At the age of three-and-a-half, he moved to Natick, Massachusetts. He went to Natick High
School, where he was inducted into the National Honor Society. He graduated from
Wesleyan University in 1971 majoring in sociology.
Mr. Holden’s career started with working for the Funari Construction Co. as the general contractor and builder in his hometown, Natick, Massachusetts. He worked there for two years. Not knowing what he wanted to do next, he started his career in education at the Fessenden School, in West Newton, Massachusetts from the first week of October in 1972 through June of 1975. He was a teacher of multiple mathematics classes, a coach Horowitz 7 of soccer, varsity basketball, and varsity lacrosse, a dorm parent for the seventh grade boys and the eighth grade boys for all three years, with seven and five day boarding in each, and he founded the Outing Club, taking trips on the weekends to New Hampshire.
At the start of the next school year, Mr. Holden worked at the Groton School, at which he stayed for six years. In those years, he taught a variety of mathematics courses, coached football, basketball, and lacrosse, proctored many dorms, including some with his wife,
Joan Griffin Ogilvy, whom he met at the Groton School. Later, he worked at Lawrence
Academy in Groton, Massachusetts for three years as the Dean of Students, as well as a coach and a mathematics teacher. During this time, he maintained his position as a dorm proctor at the Groton School with Joan, who he married on July 3, 1976. Since July of
1986, Mr. Holden has been working at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Bethesda,
Maryland, and now in Potomac, Maryland as the head of the Upper School and the
Academic Dean. In July 1989, Mr. Holden became the Assistant Head of School, a lacrosse coach, and a mathematics teacher.
Mr. Holden will retire after 42 years of teaching in June. Although he has no definite plans for his retirement, Mr. Holden plans to explore the world, while school is in session. He will continue to read his magazines on education, and hopefully continue his work in education. Mr. Holden currently lives in Alexandria, Virginia and has three daughters and a son. He recently became a grandfather.
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Historical Contextualization
Teaching Pedagogy: Changing America’s Education
Lev Vygotsky, a famous educational psychologist of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century declared, “Pedagogy must be oriented not to the yesterday, but to the tomorrow of the child’s development. Only then can it call to life in the process of education those processes of development which now lie in the zone of proximal development” (Vygotsky 251-252). This statement illustrates that Vygotsky pushed for drastic changes in the way educators approach teaching new material. Vygotsky wanted professors to remember the purpose of a progressive education and how that affects students. John Dewey, an American philosopher, described the theory of progressive education by saying, “I believe that education…is a process of living and not a preparation for future living” (qtd. in Hassard). Since teachers began teaching, innovators have been sharing their ideas on what students should learn and how they should learn it while shaping teaching styles to maximize student learning. With the goal being the child’s ever-expanding knowledge, approaches to and reasons for improving teaching methods have differed throughout the centuries. Therefore, in order to understand the perspective of John Holden, an educator of forty-two years in the field of mathematics, one must first be aware of the history of and the changes made in educational practices from the early nineteenth century to the present.
Informed by the theories of several prominent educational philosophers, professors have modernized their approach to teaching so that new information is more accessible and effective to students. Theorists Lev Vygotsky, Jean Piaget, John Dewey, and Jerome Bruner all present different theories on approaches to teaching that are Horowitz 9 utilized by educators and debated by instructors as to which idea is the most effective. All of these theories in reality are integral to shaping the way teachers present new material to students.
Born in 1896, Lev S. Vygotsky is arguably the most influential educational theorist of the early twentieth century because he presented original, thought-provoking hypotheses that changed the way educators approach teaching. Vygotsky devoted his life to producing new methods of understanding the developmental psychology of learners.
Although his main focus was the most effective way to teach children, his knowledge was practical and effective for people of all ages. With this passionate interest in fine- tuning teaching methods, Vygotsky devised the sociocultural theory. “Vygotsky is best known for being an educational psychologist with a sociocultural theory. This theory suggests that social interaction leads to continuous step-by-step changes in children’s thought and behavior that can vary greatly from culture to culture.” (Woolfolk, 1998)
This theory implies that interaction with people and cultural norms will aid in development and shape a child’s personalized view on the world. His theory consists of several elements such as “private speech” and “the zone of proximal development”
(Gallagher), both of which improve as the subject ages. According to Christina
Gallagher’s article, Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky, development of private speech occurs when children are very young, as they “often use private speech when a task becomes too difficult and the child doesn’t know how to proceed.”
Along with his sociocultural theory, Vygotsky produced three theories of learning and development. He introduces these theories in his book Reading on the
Developments of Children, stating, “All concepts of the relationship between Horowitz 10 development and learning can be put into three theoretical positions: assumption that the processes of child development are not related to learning; the assumption that learning is development; both learning and development should be combined.” (Vygotsky 29-30)
The first theoretical position, child development and learning are not related, is one that the theorist Piaget 1fully supported. This theory embodied the ideology that educators can learn from a child’s natural instincts, but that teaching does not aid in the discoveries made by children themselves.
The second position, based on theories such as reflex, reflects the idea that learning develops a child’s mind. These people believe that with fully conditioned reflexes, development will be influenced. Vygotsky quotes William James’ book, Talk to
Teachers, in his own book, stating, “As James expressed it,” referring to this second theoretical position, “Education, in short, cannot be better described than by calling it the organization of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies to behavior” (qtd. in Vygotsky
30). In Vygotsky’s closing remarks about the first and second theoretical positions, he compares and contrasts:
"But despite the similarity between the first and second theoretical positions, there
is a major difference in their assumptions about the temporal relationship between
learning and developmental processes. Theorists who hold the first view assert
that developmental cycles precede learning cycles; maturation precedes learning
and instruction must lag behind mental growth. For the second group of theorists,
both processes occur simultaneously; learning and development coincide at all
1 Piaget and Vygotsky were raised in the same era, yet they upheld differing viewpoints. While Vygotsky acknowledged all of the beliefs that professors have, Piaget focused solely on his ideas. Horowitz 11
points in the same way that two identical geometrical figures coincide when
superimposed." (Vygotsky 30)
The third theoretical position, however, takes a more universal and balanced median of the first and second positions. In fact, this position is a combination of the other two theories. Kurt Koffka, a professor, theorized the following: “development is based on two inherently different but related processes, each of which influences the other” (qtd. in
Vygotsky 30). Different from the other theories, three aspects of the third position are new: the combination of the first and third theoretical positions; ideas that the two processes that make up development are mutually dependent and interactive; and the expanded role it ascribes to learning in child development. All of these theories made way for many classroom reformations; however, they also made way for newer theories to surface.
Often debated are the ideas of Vygotsky and Piaget, even though they had different ideas as to how education should be approached. According to Saul McLeod,
“Piaget was the first psychologist to make a systematic study of cognitive development”
(Piaget, McLeod). Born in August 1896, Piaget was able to change the way education was being utilized. In fact, McLeod remarks, “Before Piaget’s work, the common assumption in psychology was that children are merely less competent thinkers than adults. Piaget showed that young children think in strikingly different ways compared to adults” (Piaget, McLeod), referring to Piaget’s numerous reforms. Intrigued by children’s reasoning, Piaget introduced a new term called schemas. McLeod defined schemas as “a unit of knowledge that children explain on their own” (Piaget, McLeod). Frequently used in his reasoning, “schemas” became a universally known word to the people of Piaget’s Horowitz 12 time. Piaget deduced two theories from his examination of child behavior and reasoning: assimilation and accommodation. Both of these ideas helped make the learning process for children easier: assimilation, learning new material using an existing schema and accommodation, the modification of a confusing schema into one that is easier to understand. These theorists were compared and contrasted because of their different approaches to teaching and learning effectively. Neither theorist claim victory for his theories being the ‘correct’ theories, as it is the similarities in these two theorists that are still utilized in daily learning.
Born in 1915, Jerome Bruner is one of the more modern educational theorists who made significant improvements in the cognitive field of education. Believing that children learn in hands-on ways, writers of The Constructivist Theory believed that
Bruner composed three basic principles for learning:
“Instruction must be concerned with the experiences and contexts that make the
student willing and able to learn (readiness)...instruction must be structured so
that it can be easily grasped by the student (spiral organization)...instruction
should be designed to facilitate extrapolation and or fill in the gaps (going beyond
the information given.” (Instructional Design)
These principles are used in teaching all around the United States, and have been proven successful. His principles suggest that if a child is not willing to learn, they will not learn. Bruner also had three models of representation: enactive, iconic, and symbolic. “Enactive learning is action based on information, otherwise known as muscle memory; iconic is information stored visually; and symbolic is language and codes (Bruner, McLeod).” These three categories are still very much used today to Horowitz 13 classify students as different types of learners: visual, tactile, or auditory. Bruner stressed the importance of language in learning, as McLeod would call it “[Language is] more flexible, yet complex to understand” (Bruner, McLeod).
Along with his basic principles and models of representation, Bruner invented the constructivist theory, the learning theory, and has many ideas on cognitive growth. In his study on Bruner, McLeod defined Bruner’s constructivist theory by stating,
“Bruner’s constructivist theory suggests it is effective when faced with new
material to follow a progression from enactive to iconic to symbolic
representation; this holds true even for adult learners. A true instructional
designer, Bruner’s work also suggests that a learner even of a very young age is
capable of learning any material so long as the instruction is organized
appropriately, in sharp contrast to the beliefs of Piaget and other stage theorists.”
(Bruner, McLeod)
It is important that Bruner considers adults as learners too, but Bruner highlights the idea that adults and children learn the same way. Bruner’s methods focused more on the outcome of learning new material; similar to that of Piaget, he wanted children to be able to “invent” (Bruner, McLeod) their own solutions to problems that they encounter. These principles were embodied in his learning theory.
Bruner also explored the field of cognitive growth, concluding the following, as expressed by McLeod, “cognitive growth involves an interaction between basic human capabilities and ‘culturally invented technologies that serve as amplifiers of these capabilities’” (Bruner, McLeod). Horowitz 14
Bruner’s ideology is embraced by today’s culture and used in teaching all types of students. In fact, The Wall Street Journal further proves that Bruner’s methods have affected students, especially young ones, positively in helping them improve their mathematics and science skills, reporting:
“American students didn't improve their reading or writing abilities much in the
last decade, but they made significant strides in math and science, an Education
Department study shows. Young students made the greatest gains in math and
science, with nine-year-olds performing at the equivalent of about one grade level
higher in 1992 than they did a decade earlier, according to the National
assessment of Educational Progress report.” (August 18, 1994)
Although none of these theorists focused directly on bettering mathematics, their theories and reasoning helped improve it by leaps and bounds by changing the way teachers approach the subject. Before delving into how mathematics has been improved, it is important to first understand where it all started. According to Patricia Baggett, math textbooks did not appear until around 1800, but were “used for vocational training in arithmetic in the eighteenth century, information useful for merchants, shopkeepers, craftsmen, and artisans” (Baggett). These books focused more on numerical concepts, with rare occurrences of a word problem and were utilized by teachers, not students.
Soon, mathematics was no longer “a mindless drill,” as Baggett referred to it, because teachers began to embody a more hands-on style of teaching, similar to the ideology of
Bruner. Baggett even stated, “learning any kind of mathematics, even the most dull and dumb, develops a child’s mental ability” (Baggett). This effort to make mathematics Horowitz 15 more interesting has remained prevalent since the movement began. It started in the
1960s, and since then math textbooks have been growing in size and numbers.
According to Baggett, the growth of size and information in these textbooks is due to the fact that “there have been several attempts to revise mathematical curricula.
Most of them have been geared primarily toward the higher grades, and their influence on elementary school practices has not been great” (Baggett). Higher grades were achieved, as recognized in The Wall Street Journal in 1994,
“Educators attributed the math and science improvements to the education-reform
efforts of the 1980s, when many schools focused on these subjects. Schools had
diluted these classes in the 1970s, and once they started making courses more
rigorous in the 1980s, students' achievement began to rise.” (Sharpe)
Not only that, but the standard of high school was forced higher, and in The New York
Times an article was written by Edward Fiske stated, "Carol Cashen, director of educational program support, said the standard had, among other things, “stimulated enrollment in advanced math classes, improved student writing and caused high schools to increase their own academic requirements'" (Fiske).
Furthermore, there were three radical reforms that changed the way numbers are looked at now, and both are from a theoretical and practical viewpoint. First is the
“unification of arithmetic systems,” (Baggett) which introduced the idea of real numbers, providing—as Baggett would say—“a basis for many other mathematical theories that have important applications” (Baggett). The second major reform is the “algebrization of arithmetic,” as it broke the barrier between algebra and arithmetic, stating that arithmetic is numbers and algebra is letters is no longer true, as they are now combined and Horowitz 16 intertwined. The third and final radical reform is “the automatization of arithmetic algorithms,” which came with the understanding of algorithms in general, along with the theory that algorithms go hand in hand with geometry. As this modernization occurred, calculators were quick, cheap, reliable, and convenient, and soon the need for a pen and paper to do regular mathematical problems became a thing of the past.
In a review of the book The Seventies of America, Salem Press, a publishing company, provides, “the decade of the 1970’s was…[when] the rise of teacher activism, and the establishment of the Department of Education [began]” (Salem Press). New reforms such as open education were introduced. Salem Press describes the open classroom by saying:
“The concept of the open classroom had many variations, but generally it
involved learning that was initiated and directed by students themselves…and the
use of widespread media…At the high school level, open education frequently
involved lessening required courses and increasing the number of electives.”
(Salem Press)
This idea showed that there are many different ways to teach students the same information, and they are all effective, as there are many different types of learners to be accommodated for. The Salem Press’ final remarks, “concern over apparently dropping test scores [caused] the quality of American education to grow” (Salem Press) indicate that a good education has been a priority since the 1970s.2
2 Salem Press also accounts for the desegregation and Civil Rights acts that were occurring at the same time as the push for higher learning. They remark, “In addition to a massive campaign for the racial desegregation of schools, the decade saw attempts to extend the concept of civil rights in education to areas such as school funding, opportunities for women, and the teaching of disabled students” (Salem Press), because they saw the need to take steps towards improving the general education level of the United States. Horowitz 17
Although reformation in education was not seen as important until the 1970s, there have always been theorists who have pushed for reforms in education. These certain theorists are especially important in terms of making learning easier for all different types of children and adults. Without these first steps in education reformation, progressive schools like St. Andrew’s Episcopal School would not be structured the way they are today. Many people take for granted what these professors have done for them, or they do not realize what education was like before these professors were alive. Thus, it is important to be fully aware that education has improved by leaps and bounds, and that it is the duty of educators to continue to develop their research in child psychology in order to better education for future generations.
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Interview Transcription
Interviewee/Narrator: Robert Johnson Holden Interviewer: Sarah Horowitz Location: Mr. Holden’s home, Alexandria, VA Date: December 28th, 2013
Sarah Horowitz: This is Sarah Horowitz and I am interviewing Robert Johnson Holden,
Jr. as part of the American Century Oral History Project. This interview took place on
December 28, 2013 at Mr. Holden’s house in Alexandria, Virginia at 9:00 am. What was it like growing up in Massachusetts during the 1950’s and 1960’s?
John Holden: I grew up in a town—a suburb, Natick, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, about seventeen miles outside of Boston. My dad worked at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a dean of residents and a dean of students, and he eventually moved and lived on campus, but not while I was growing up. They moved to Cambridge when I was eighteen when I went to college—or actually seventeen when I went to college and Natick was, I moved there when I was three and a half years old, right about then. I think about 1952 or 1953—I don’t know those exact dates. It was a very white suburb. There were two African Americans that were in our school and they were good friends of mine, actually played football with me, and it was just a great place. I grew up in a development that was built by a contractor in the late 1940s and after the Second
World War, they built many of these kind of, it was Martin Cheral was the name of the contractor and he built, it was called the Sherwood Forest Area. I lived on Nottingham
Drive, and there was Sherwood Road, and anyhow there was Robinhood Road. It was a very interesting place. I had great friends who I was very fortunate that my backyard Horowitz 19 backed up to these nice woods. We had this place where we could go play when we were kids, with homes all around it. My good friend, Jimmy Whitcomb, who was my age, and he had a younger brother and sister, Pam was a little older, and Skippy Halpren lived nearby. We used to go and run and play in the woods after school. I walked a half a mile to the Brown School, which was the elementary school. Walked to school in the morning, walked home for lunch, ate lunch at home, walked back to school, had school in the afternoon, then walked home again. So, I literally did walk, it was about six-tenths of a mile—more than two miles a day—back and forth twice to school and we did not even bring our lunch, everything was very close, it was just that kind of place. I rode my bike when I got older, when I was actually able to ride my bike, and so forth. And it was just a really wonderful place. [2:36]
SH: It sounds like it.
JH: I played intermural sports, starting in elementary school, basketball for the, it was actually, they didn’t do every elementary school had a team, so it was the Cole School team which was a little farther away, and that was how it worked out. I went to Wilson Jr.
High School, and then went to Natick High School. And junior high school was grades, I guess it was seven, eight, and nine, and high school was ten, eleven, and twelve.
SH: Wow. That sounds like a fun little town.
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JH: It was. It was wonderful. I played sports while I was in high school, and I was fortunate enough to be a good basketball player. And by my senior year I was starting on the varsity basketball team and the same with our football team, and we had a great group of athletes. And we won—we were in a league called the Bay State League,
Massachusetts is called the Bay State—and we had, anyhow we won our league championship in basketball and got to go play in Boston, the old Boston Garden, because we got into the state finals. We played three different games in the Boston Garden. And then our football team won the Bay State Championships in football. And, they didn’t have lacrosse in my town and I didn’t play baseball, so in the spring I did track.
SH: Oh, okay.
JH: So I was a football, basketball, and then track—
SH: You were a sporty guy—
JH: —I was. I was an athlete. But I happened to be, I was very fortunate because I was a pretty strong academic student, and was able to earn a place on the national honor society. We had 500 kids in my class in high school, and in my junior year, there were twenty of us, I was one of the first twenty people inducted into the national honor society as a junior. And I was the only person on the football team who was on the national honor society and started on the football team—or even was on the football team—there just weren’t any other people. Horowitz 21
SH: That’s a big honor.
JH: I was just very fortunate and blessed.
SH: Yes you were. What did your parents do for a living?
JH: As I said, my dad worked at MIT, and that’s what brought us to Natick. He’d been a
Unitarian minister in New Bedford, Massachusetts and that’s what he started out to be.
After college, he went to Harvard Divinity School and then he went to Cleveland to be a
Unitarian Minister, and met my mother in Cleveland. They got married, moved to Natick, where we got a parish—or excuse me, moved to New Bedford, where we got a parish for the Unitarian Church there. We lived in the parsonage house. I don’t remember it because
I was born in 1949, my sister was four years older than I was, just the two of us, and my parents. Then we moved to Natick because my dad became head of religious services and dean of students at MIT, and then as I said became the dean of residents and actually lived on campus during the troubled sixties, when all the students went on strike during the Vietnam War. I don’t know how he got everybody through it, but he did that as a dean of students at MIT, as a dean of residents, living on campus and keeping everything settled. My mom was the family coordinator, stay at home mom—in a classic way.
Almost no moms worked then. Almost all the moms were out watching us as we came to school, and went back and forth. Everybody took care of everybody else; it was in one of those great neighborhoods. And that was back in the day when you could just go outside Horowitz 22 and play. I would come home from elementary school and just ride my bike and play with my friends and we’d make up football games. And we’d do sports almost all the time when we got old enough to do that. As I said, we had these big woods I used to play in as a kid, and I just remember building forts and playing cowboys and Indians and war, and all the fun things that young people do when your growing up. [6:47]
SH: Can you please describe your education as a child?
JH: As I said, I went to Brown School, and it was a very basic public education through public high school. So, Brown School started there in kindergarten and stayed there through sixth grade. And then Wilson Jr. High School went through seven, eight, and nine. And then Natick High School, and I graduated in 1967, so it was a really great time.
It was all those years after the Second World War. After Korea and people back from
War at that point and people just trying to have a good life raising their families.
SH: So, what were your teachers like?
JH: I had great teachers. I honestly can’t remember many of them. I’m not sure why. I can remember in high school, Mr. Lavern, my French teacher. He was a great guy. He carried me my senior year in French 4 and gave me a B—he was very kind to me. But I didn’t deserve it. I was very bad at hearing and understanding the oral component of
French. And he was also the coordinator of the national honor society, so I got to know him a little bit. But I had great teachers; I really enjoyed all of them. I could remember Horowitz 23 my music teacher in ninth grade at Wilson Junior High School when I said, “My name is
John Holden,” and she said, “Your name is Robert Johnson Holden Jr. I’m going to call you Robert. I’m not calling you John.” I had been called John for my middle name ever since I was born because my mother didn’t want another ‘Robert’ or ‘Bob’ or ‘Rob’ in the house. [8:36]
SH: Oh, that’s an interesting thing; I didn’t know that. Were you able to ask for extra help from any of the teachers?
JH: It was one of the things that I guess academics came easily for me, and I don’t ever remember asking for any. I just came home and dutifully did my homework. In high school, it was always athletics after school and then my parents, I don’t even remember how I got home, I guess my parents drove me home. I don’t think there was a bus, so my mom would come and pick me up, and the high school was only two and half miles away, so it wasn’t very far, so I came home and did my homework, whatever that was, and as I said, I was fortunate enough to pretty much get A’s and high B’s and that’s how I got on the national honor society, and it just worked well for me. I really never had to go for much extra help. [9:27]
SH: Okay. So, were you assigned much homework?
JH: I don’t think I was assigned a lot of homework. I was assigned homework, we had something in every course every night, but I don’t ever remember having to stay up like Horowitz 24 you guys do till midnight trying to get things done like you guys do or staying up till one in the morning trying to get that last paper and so forth. I had some great teachers. They were really very strong excellent teachers, and they gave us homework, but I guess it was just enough so that I was able to get the problems done and the little short essays written.
I remember, I kept a journal every single day ever since sophomore year in high school. I had Mrs. McGuire for English, she was a fabulous English teach, or maybe I had her my junior year. And she really got us writing a lot, so it worked out well. [10:29]
SH: It sounds like it, especially because you were doing all of these sports.
JH: Yup. Yeah I was pretty involved. I was also on the safety patrol in high school. The safety patrol were the students who stood at the stairways and made sure students walked in the right direction. We had stairways where you could go one way and for whatever reason, I was elected vice president of the safety patrol my senior year and then the president got into academic difficulty and had to get dropped off and they didn’t replace him. So I was the president, I sort of just fell into it, and we were able to give detentions to students, which they would have to stay after school. So if somebody was screwing around and they were causing a problem, the safety patrol could give them detentions.
And as the vice president, I was the guy who had to write up every detention form, and the president was supposed to check to make sure nobody was doing anything malicious, and trying to give too many detentions or trying to get after any one person. I was basically on my honor to be very honest to not get after anybody. I never did, I never used that in any way. Horowitz 25
SH: So you had all the power.
JH: I had all the power, and didn’t misuse it at all. And so that was one of the things they did in high school. [11:58]
SH: That sounds like a lot of fun. How much of an influence did your parents play in your education?
JH: My father and mother both believed very strongly in education and I actually, they have many friends who worked in independent schools. And one of the reasons that I got teaching was because my dad as a Unitarian minister, one of the couples, Gordon and
Paula Anne, they called her P.A. Schofield he married them when they were younger and
Gordon Schofield became a headmaster of, he worked at three different independent schools. And we used to see them; they didn’t live in the same town as we did, but they, traveled through and so forth. I can remember, we always ate dinner together as a family every night, and when people would come to visit, they had great conversations with them. And I knew that education was very important in our family. My father and mother both came from very well educated families and wanted to be sure that I got a great education. And I did; it worked out great for me. [13:03]
SH: Did they push you very hard to do good in school?
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JH: I don’t remember that. I just kind of knew I was supposed to work and do a good job. As I said, I was blessed that my brain was able to do well academically when I dug in and did it, and so I don’t remember them ever pushing me. I remember them congratulating me on great report cards. So it worked out; I was very fortunate that it worked out the way that it did. [13:30]
SH: I am most definitely assuming that you are a strong student.
JH: Mhmm (yes).
SH: But, did you have any courses that you struggled with?
JH: Yes, French. As I said, Mr. Lavern—Mr. Collins, who’s my ninth grade French teacher, he was a great person too. But I was never able to really live French in the
French language. I was always translating from English to French, and French back to
English and I worked mightily and memorized many vocabulary words and so forth, but my fluency in French never came. That was my biggest struggle. [14:12]
SH: Wow, it seems like you had it going good because you ended up in math.
JH: Yes. Eventually, it was a long road of math. We can talk about that in a little bit.
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SH: Okay. This is a quote: The following was said of Jerome Bruner, “A true instructional designer, Bruner’s work also suggests that a learner even of a very young age is capable of learning any material so long as the instruction is organized appropriately.” (Simple Psychology). Does this approach ring true in educational history?
JH: Absolutely. As an educator, I totally believe that it all comes down to students believing in themself that they can learn and putting in enough time and effort. I think I would absolutely—I know I would be successful in French if I would really put myself in a situation, an emersion situation, or something like that where I had to. I know that it would happen. Just the time that I had in high school and in classes, and then trying to learn it at home, it just wasn’t enough time to really deeply learn the language. That just wasn’t one of my natural abilities. But I absolutely believe that if you have set up the learning environment so that the student feels safe and secure and is comfortable and not threatened in any way, and I felt that in my school and all through my public school system and in college when I went to Wesleyan University, except for one course. I was threatened by one teacher, who they fired my freshman year. I absolutely believe with what Jerome Bruner is saying in that anyone can learn anything if they have the desire.
You have to have the desire and then mental discipline to make yourself do the necessary work—all the repetitions, whatever it takes. [16:07]
SH: Exactly. While in high school, what were your thoughts and attitudes about the way teachers communicated and imparted knowledge?
Horowitz 28
JH: My teachers were very supportive. They were excellent in explaining things; as I said, luckily I was able to pick it up at the pace that they explained it. My other challenge is that I am a slow reader; I am a very slow reader; I took probably three different reading courses—I did even one in college to try to increase my reading speed, none of which worked. So that’s been one of my, I guess learning vulnerabilities that I had to work around so that even when I exercise, you see I have a reading stand on my bike over there, and I will read while I exercise because it just takes me a long time. I’ve really enjoyed starting to listen to books now, because auditorally I pick things up. I can even make it go faster than regular speech. I read like 250 words per minute, and that was my greatest challenge. That’s very few words. Our head of school, Mr. Kosasky, told me once that he could read 10000 words per minute, so you can see we’re very different. I’m not blessed with quick brain—maybe that’s the problem with French too. It’s just my brain doesn’t click. It takes a while, but obviously I do well, and I have been able to work around that vulnerability throughout my life. [17:43]
SH: Yeah.
JH: I was also in the 25th percentile in spelling, Sarah. I was not the greatest speller back in ninth grade when they tested us.
SH: Really?
Horowitz 29
JH: Yeah. For whatever reason, and I love spell check, it’s great. I’ve learned to spell many words out, but that was another one that just wasn’t naturally. Figuring out all those vowels and how they go together. It is complicated. [18:07]
SH: How did your high school education affect your study choices or subject choices in college?
JH: It’s very interesting. French, I disliked, as I said, but I enjoyed my history courses. I enjoyed math, English, I enjoyed science very much, and so I was very open when I went to college as to what I might major in. In my freshman year, I took an introductory
English course; I took a history of music course; I took an art history course. I just was experimenting with things that I didn’t have an opportunity to learn about. And I loved all of those. I especially loved the history of music course, which really went from gorgonian chants all the way up through early 20th century music. And so you got slices of all these different genres. And that was excellent; I really enjoyed doing it. And I took an intro to psych course. Too much reading though, so I dropped that. As soon as they dropped that thick packet down, and said you’re reading a book a week and da-da-dah, I was like this is not for me. I switched. And I did end up majoring in sociology, which is the study of people and their interactions with the physical world. It’s not quite the same as psychology, but it was a great major for somebody going into education. [19:29]
SH: Yeah, and that actually kind of leads to my next question, which is how did your major prepare you for career choice? Horowitz 30
JH: Yeah. The sociology course was superb, all the courses that I took. I remember one in particular which was the study of how the physical layout of buildings affected the interaction of the people working or using the building for whatever purpose. We went all around, Wesleyan University is in Middletown Connecticut, and we visited various libraries, and certainly we analyzed the buildings at Wesleyan and we went to some public schools and really talked about how important it is when you design the building to create natural flows, so that people just kind of interact or just bump into each other.
Because it creates great communication and communication is the key to everything working in the world. And one of the great things for me was that when we built our current campus for the Postoak campus at St. Andrew’s, I was on the building committee.
And so my background with my sociology courses and layout design, I mean one of the reasons my office is where I have it so that I can sit at my desk, look out the window, into the hall, walk out into the hall and interact easily with people was all done on purpose.
That was all because of my sociology course back in college that was about the design of buildings and how the architect really has a lot of control on the interactions that take place between the people inside the building. [21:17]
SH: Wow. I never knew that the layout was designed just like that.
JH: It was, purposefully.
SH: That’s so cool. Did you get certified to be a teacher coming out of college? Horowitz 31
JH: Nope. The great thing about independent schools is you do not have to be certified.
You have to have graduated from college and actually, I majored in sociology, and this is where it was a hard start in my career and I maybe I said this to you on the telephone when we had the interview at one point but I signed up—I graduated from college in
1971 and the Vietnam War was just ending, and they were still drafting people into the army, right up until the summer after I graduated. So I graduated in early June of 1971, and they stopped the draft in September. And my draft number was such that I would probably have been called had they continued the War and the draft went on, and companies, because I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I signed up, because companies like General Electric or Proctor and Gamble would come to campus and interview people because they were looking for smart people, and they knew that
Wesleyan University had well educated people and so I signed up for them and the very first one, and the guy said, “What’s your draft number?” and I said, I think it was like 181 or something like that, I cant even remember now. And he said, “Oh no, you’ll get drafted, we’re not going to spend any time interviewing you.” So none of the companies wanted to interview people who were going to obviously go off to the War. And so I didn’t do that. So I finished my education and I worked a couple of summers for a construction company called the Funari Construction Company, and George Funari lived in Natick, Massachusetts, and it was just this one guy who ran this small company where he renovated houses and built houses and that kind of thing. So I went to work for him and at the end of the summer, after painting the inside of the new West Suburban Arena, which was the new ice hockey rink they built behind my high school because hockey was Horowitz 32 huge and ice hockey was huge in Massachusetts and in my town. They actually ended up building two rinks, they built a second one, even after the one that I painted the inside all summer long, and then George Funari came in and we rebuilt the boards around the rink.
I was still working for the ice rink and he came and then I left with him, I just resigned from the ice rink. I didn’t really want to drive the Zamboni or do those things, which is what they wanted to do next, and I was leaning very much to staying in my hometown after college, as many people do. But I worked for George Funari and that’s where also I got a lot of good—I learned tons about building things, because we would tear apart houses and then rebuild them, doing renovations. We built this house on Cape Cod. We would drive from Natick down to The Cape and we did that all in the spring and so that was a great education for me, just to understand again, how buildings work, the physical layout, and actually how to construct things. So that really helped lead me into education and the, as a kid, my parents worked at a summer camp called Cragin Mountain Farm, and that was significant because as I mentioned, Gorton Schofield, who became headmaster of three different schools during his career, was the director of the camp, and my parents worked there three summers when I was six, seven, and eight years old. Then
I continued to go there as a camper and then I worked there, and all the faculty or the counselors were kids from independent schools because they were recruited by the director to come and work there, so that’s where my influence in independent schools came, but I never got certified because independent schools do not require that. I was interviewed by a man over the telephone, Ralph Plumley, who ran a—it was called the
School Service Bureau, and it was a company that helped people get into teaching at independent schools. It was a placement service. I signed up with him and contracted Horowitz 33 him, and I paid no fee. What is done is that the independent school pays these companies—we use one too, called Carnie Sandion Associates at St. Andrew’s, and if we place somebody and hire them to teach at our school, the school pays the fee to the company. The teacher candidate—the poor people like myself, who have no money whatsoever, don’t have to pay anything. And, so I had a great conversation with him. He called me up, because this was now I and gone back to work at summer camp after working for the contractor for a year, I knew I didn’t want to build houses. There was only one adjective that anyone ever used and it was the “F” word over and over again.
Contractors talked and you had your coffee during coffee breaks and talked about the
Celtics and the New England Patriots, and all of the sport teams, and it just wasn’t enough for me having been educated in college. And Ralph Plumley said, “What would you like to teach?” and I said, “I don’t have any idea. I haven’t thought about it very deeply,” and he said, “Well, how about English and history? They’re always looking for
English and history teachers.” And I said, “No. I really love math the most. I almost was a math major in college, but I didn’t major in math.” So he said, “Okay, we’ll put you down as a math teacher.” And I literally had a conversation with him on Tuesday. On
Thursday, I received in the mail from him an opening at the Fessenden School, this was now in the third week of September, they had a surprise opening in math, and they said call right away. The interviewed me on Friday, and on Monday, six days later, I was teaching at the Fessenden School, the first week of October. My girlfriend and I went back up to the summer camp. We spent the weekend together. I found out I got this job on Friday afternoon; they literally hired me as I walked out the door of the interview.
And on Monday morning, I drove in and had my one suitcase of clothes. I had one jacket Horowitz 34 and tie and shirt and literally was running a seventh grade boys dorm with twenty-two boys in it. I was teaching four courses: sixth grade math course, and then a couple of algebra courses and an algebra two course, and I was coaching a fifth grade soccer team with thirty-one soccer players. And I had never played soccer in my life, and we had our first game on Wednesday. So it was like jumped right into the fire. Trial by fire, and it worked out wonderfully and I had a great experience. Somehow, I pulled it all off, walked into the classroom, I was literally handed the textbooks when I drove in Monday morning for the classes I was teaching and I literally had to ask the kids, I said, “Okay, did you guys have any homework or anything? What page were you on, on Friday?” and then the kids told me, and that’s how I started. [28:42]
SH: Wow. And this was an all boys’ independent school?
JH: All boys’ independent school. It was kindergarten through eighth grade—it now goes through ninth grade, but it was kindergarten through eighth grade, and boarding and day.
SH: Boarding?
JH: Yes, we had fourth graders, as young as fourth grade boarders, and some of them were five day boarders that would come Monday through Friday and go home on the weekend, but there were a number of them that were there the whole time. So every other weekend, I was on duty, and every other night, I was on duty. Because we had the dorm Horowitz 35 set up was that there was somebody at either end of the hallway, a dorm master. And we alternated nights on duty and weekends. [29:24]
SH: Wow.
JH: No certification.
SH: No certification?
JH: Just walk in the door. I wasn’t even a math major, and I was teaching math to these kids. Because the headmaster, Mr. Koffin, actually said to me, “John, you’ve gotten through all the high school. You were on the honor society student in high school. You can teach these kids algebra one.” And I said, “Okay, I’m there.” And that’s when I started getting back and next year; I started working on my Masters in education at
Boston University. At nights and on the weekends and in the summer I took classes, and it took me five years to get done. To legitimize myself, I got a Masters in education in teaching of mathematics. So from Boston University—I guess I never put that on my timeline, did I? [30:17]
SH: Yeah, I wasn’t sure.
JH: Yeah. I got a Masters in education, and I got it in 1977, so it took me a number of years. Horowitz 36
SH: Wow. This is back to when you were a student.
JH: Yes.
SH: You probably had both good teachers and bad teachers. What was it about those teachers that made them good and bad?
JH: It was their enthusiasm and excitement about what they were teaching, and how I just fed off that, when the teacher was the person who was passionate and energized the students. That’s what got me excited as well. And it didn’t really matter what the subject matter was, I liked it all—except for French. But I did have to take two years of French in college, and that was really hard, because I had gone through four years in high school of
French. And they gave me a placement test, and I barely made it into second year French in college, so I took two semesters of French, anyhow and passed barely. [31:26]
SH: Wow, that sounds like a struggle.
JH: Yeah, it was. But, anybody who, I think anybody who has a passion and excitement, and just oozes and bubbles out of you. You can tell when people really like working with kids too. They’re the best teachers, and were definitely my best teachers.
SH: It seems like that. And it seems like we have a lot of those teachers at St. Andrew’s. Horowitz 37
JH: And that’s where it’s been so great for me. The last twenty-eight years, being the person who coordinates hiring, because the first question we always ask is, “What brings you to teaching? What excites you about being a teacher?” and their answer has to be, “I love working with kids.” Because that’s the number one priority, they’re certainty going to know their subject matter, but if they love working with kids and are passionate about their subject, and are willing to learn, that’s what is going to create the best learning environment. And that’s St. Andrew’s. [32:26]
SH: Exactly what did you imagine you would do as a career once you got out of school?
JH: When I graduated from college in 1971, I had no idea because of the War in
Vietnam, and not being able to interview and find out what’s going on with companies and those kinds of things. And that’s what was nice, that I had worked with this contractor, so I went back to work for him for the year, and I really enjoyed that, but certainly found out that I didn’t want to do that forever, although I loved it and I was really good at it, and he, Mr. George Funari would joke with me; he would say, “Mr.
Holden, you learn too quickly! I show you this stuff and you remember how to do it, and
I never have to show you again. You’re like the only person that I’ve ever had like this.”
So I guess there was more repetition for some of the other people that he had to work with. And my brain—I was really good spatially, and being able to put houses together and formulate things, and talk through stuff with them, and he was a good teacher too. He Horowitz 38 loved what he did and was a very great craftsman. It was fun working with him. I can’t remember what we were talking about then… go ahead, ask the next question. [33:32]
SH: This goes back to teaching.
JH: Yup.
SH: Were there any specific teaching methodologies that were popular when you first began teaching?
JH: See, I took all these education courses when I was at Boston University, I don’t remember any of them. This is what I remember: I remember the conversation I had with the head of the math department at Milton Academy. I was in interviewing for a job there, and I said, “Well, I want to go back to school to learn how to be a teacher.” And he looked at me and said, “Where are you going to do that?” And I said, “Oh, I was thinking of Boston University, and starting a graduate program there”—this is when I was first interviewing. And he said, “That’s not how you learn to teach.” He said, “All those philosophy courses, and all those educators out there who have written all that stuff, they don’t know what they’re talking about. You have to be in the classroom with the kids, and really work with them.” And that’s absolutely been my philosophy all along. I’ve learned a lot from educators who have written about working with kids, but it’s more me translating, in essence what they’ve written and trying to put it in practical application with students. It has worked the best for me as a teacher. And this is where I’ve been so Horowitz 39 excited about all kinds of minds and now taking the research that neurologists are doing with the brain and then trying to link it practically in the classroom with students. There are a lot of people and philosophies, psychologists and so forth, and I never spent a lot of time, and I never remember the names of those kinds of people and how they’ve affected me, because again, it’s really just me analyzing how to reach each student. This is why I love this philosophy about St. Andrew’s, and its matched me so completely, to know and inspire each student because its trying to figure out how to best reach each brain in the room, and how to reach each brain in the room and keep their minds active and working and to help get them excited about learning, because again, it’s that effort when they’re excited and willing to put in the time and work at it.
SH: Mhmm
JH: I agree, anyone can learn anything.
SH: Like Jerome Bruner.
JH: Exactly right. [35:58]
SH: How attuned were you to the needs of students with learning challenges earlier in your career?
Horowitz 40
JH: I don’t know, I somehow figured it all out. But in my second year of teaching algebra one, I had this one kid who just couldn’t sit still, and we sat down and talked about it one afternoon after school, and I said “Okay, why don’t we do this. Let’s pull the desks away from the back wall, we’ll put you in the back row, and anytime you have the need to move and so forth, you can get up and move.” We talked about it with all the kids in the class, and they all agreed that it would be okay, and he became a much better math student. Because, again, I was a teacher who was trying to attune myself to the needs of the kids, and figure out what would be best and most helpful to them. So here I was, a kid, no—I was not in graduate school at that point, or I was about to start, so I had no formal training whatsoever, it was all in my instincts of trying to figure out what would be best for this kid, because I took the time to sit with him and talk it over and he would tell me how he just couldn’t sit still and it was just really hard for him and he just hated school because of it, and we never had faculty meetings talking about kids brains and like these are the kinds of things, they have now special seats that aren’t seats, and that people can stand up at these desks instead of having to sit down, so that they are able to just adjust and when we have a body that needs to move, because not every human being needs to sit in a seat, learning in this way, we just aren’t all made the same way, and so we had this “one size fits all” educational system, and having the flexibility of being able to figure something like that out, I was pretty proud of myself. I’ve had conversations over, and over, and over again with kids—[37:52]
JH: Is that you Joan?
Horowitz 41
Joan Holden: 3 I just wanted to say, “Hi Sarah”
JH: This is Sarah Horowitz
SH: Hi.
Joan Holden: I’m Joan Holden.
SH: Hi, I’m Sarah.
Joan Holden: It’s so nice to meet you. You’re so nice to come and do this project, good for you.
SH: I’m really excited.
Joan Holden: Oh good. Are you having a nice break I hope? You’ve been home and enjoyed your family, and getting in—it’s such a nice long break.
SH: It is, it really is.
Joan Holden: Do you live over here?
3 Joan Holden, wife of John Holden, enters at this point and introduces herself to me. Horowitz 42
SH: I live in Bethesda, Maryland.
Joan Holden: Oh, it’s nice of you to treck over and do this. Well, happy New Year, you’re great to do this. Thank you, it was nice to meet you Sarah.
SH: You too. Happy holidays.4
JH: So, my entire career has been exactly what we do now in an organized and formal way, which is to figure out how to reach each student. When I came to St. Andrew’s as head of the upper school, and a man by the name of Skeeter Lee was hired the same year, and came in to be the middle school head, and the two of us absolutely in synch on that in terms of leading the teacher on okay how are we going to make the teachers make this the best learning environment for the students? And how can you get to know the kids? And this is where it was so great that we have smaller class sizes so you have that opportunity, and it started with, right in my very first years, sitting down with kids and giving extra help and okay what’s going on in that brain, and I was always thinking that way, and how can I say it to them in a way that they’d understand as I was trying to help them figure out how to do word problems and math, which always seemed to be the greatest challenge.
And finally, after workshops, I figured it out that it was because the kids didn’t read well.
I wish I was a reading teacher, I wasn’t a reading teacher, but that was what these kids needed that would help them, so all along the way, every year, every course, constantly thinking about how to reach the kids and say it in a way they would understand. [39:38]
4 At this point, Joan Holden exits the room, and the interview continues. Horowitz 43
SH: Exactly. This is another question along the same lines, due to the rise of educational disabilities such as Attention Deficit Disorder, Dyslexia, and Dyscalculia, how have your thoughts on teaching changed?
JH: All that stuff—I was very blessed because it really started, all that really started happening around the time I started working at St. Andrew’s, where teachers were doing the research and figuring out these learning vulnerabilities were all a part of what all of us had. I knew about myself with my slow reading speed, I fall under one of those things you just read about. And my language acquisition challenges of learning French and somewhat English, language to some degree, all of this, this is where getting people to workshops and reading, I have read educational journals and professional magazines and that kind of thing my entire career. Books that would come out that would be the books of the year, we would have every summer the faculty at St Andrew’s read a book that dealt with how well to get into those minds of those kids to figure out how they best learn. And so much was that piece to know the students so that we could then inspire them as teachers. So it has always been a driving force in my career back to when I first figured out that this boy had to walk back and forth or sit down and challenging somebody and saying, “Okay, I make a lot of careless errors.” Well, how are you going to work to eliminate those errors? And we’d talk about that and I bumped into a student in the Safeway here in Alexandria, must have been maybe fifteen years ago—you have to remember Sarah, this was now forty-two years ago that I started this teaching—and he came into me and said, “Mr. Holden, do you remember me?” and I said, “ What’s your Horowitz 44 name?” and he said his name, “Do you remember that conversation we had when you challenged me”—he literally said this—“about careless errors and you said I just had to concentrate and I had the brain power. I could do it if I really wanted to commit and work at it and how I jumped from D’s to B’s just by eliminating careless mistakes. This was the learning moment in my life that changed me.” [42:09]
SH: Wow.
JH: And so that’s again part of my career that I have been blessed, I guess, with the ability to figure out how to help people take their brain and maximize their learning and get them to pay attention to that.
SH: Wow. It seems like you really made a difference with a lot of students.
JH: Yeah, yeah, well I’ve tried every year, individuals and with helping teachers become better teachers so that they would effect then better students. And that has been my passion and my life. [42:43]
SH: Wow. Have students changed?
JH: It’s a great question because we talked about that as teachers, all of us who’ve been around and I think what has changed is the ability to pay attention for long periods of time, and I’m not quite certain what all it is. I mean people have talked about television, Horowitz 45 they’ve talked about the electronic, you know looking at screens where things are changing and moving a lot, versus days when there was less television and people were reading more and sitting around and having conversations. In the manner that we are now, less and less of that took place now and family is not, like my family literally having a meal every night at dinner, dad would come home, mom would cook it, my sister and I would sit there, we’d talk about things. My parents would ask us about our days, and we had to talk. And that’s all language acquisition. Because when you have practice like that where you’re talking back to somebody, when and having to formulate your ideas and articulate it, is tremendous practice at language acquisition which is the whole key. It’s all of that, we have the receptive language, the reading and the listening, and then the expressive, the writing and the oral, and those oral parts when you’re younger, when you have to sit patiently, not speak, but we’d have these meals with all those independent school people around the table, and I’d sit there for an hour, an hour and a half, listening to these conversations, not saying anything, being a part of it all, you learn patience in a way and your attentiveness is taught differently than the way young people today are. There are still some who have those kinds of conversations around the dinner table with friends and family, but sitting in a room and being a part of a conversation as a young child, just doesn’t take place as much. Kids are there still playing their games rather than paying attention to the—playing their video games on their iPod or iPad or whatever, their phones, and almost every kid has a phone now. Five year olds—it’s amazing I was sitting on the plane, coming home last evening, and the four kids I could see that were all five to eight years old were all playing on iPads the entire time, four and a half hours on the plane. Interacting not with their parents, not with each Horowitz 46 other, but with whatever the game was or stimulus that was on the iPad and that just is, the brains have developed differently because of all of that time, instead of having lots of interactions playing with my friends in the backyard, wrestling, fighting, we’d cry, we’d go home our parents would make us apologize to each other because we would hurt each other, and then we would go back and do it again. And all that playing and that way, it taught you how to interact with people and be attentive differently than you one on one with a screen interacting with whatever the designer of the—
SH: Game?
JH: —game or activity and so we as teachers have to change things now because kids just don’t stay attentive. I mean, you’re literally in competition with the screen and now we’ve provided the screens in the classrooms, so that the students can get on to whatever they want to look at, and interact with versus the teacher who is trying to explain stuff to teach you. The brains have changed and kids are less attentive and you as a teacher have to be more creative to help hook them, get them interested in the material and make it exciting and fun for them, as exciting and fun as the video games. [46:53]
SH: Do you believe that students are more or less serious about their studies?
JH: I’ve seen no change for those who want to be well educated and know because their family has brought them up that they’re going to go to college and that they’re going to get a job and be in the workforce, the kids are absolutely the same as they were back Horowitz 47 when I first started my first three years, I only taught through eighth grade, and then I went to Groton School, and those kids absolutely motivated to go to college, and then we’re going to become the most successful human beings they could possibly become because that’s the way it was in their families, and the same at St. Andrew’s right now, everybody is going to St. Andrew’s because they’re going to go to college and they’re going to be the most successful people that they could possibly be with their family and represent their families and the motivation in that way has not changed at all.
SH: Mhhm.
JH: So, the ideals of the family are still coming through. [47:54]
SH: Exactly. What are the most important questions that students have taught you over the years?
JH: It goes back to what I’ve learned in my very first years was what would be the best way that I could present something so that somebody could understand. I—one of the things that taught me a great deal—I started in—gosh, what year might it have been? My wife and I got married in 1976, so right around that time, 1977, I started tutoring in the summers for extra money on Cape Cod because we had a summer house on the Cape. So we’d go, as soon as the kids throw a bomb at their parents, and graduation was over, and we had our faculty meetings, we would drive to Cape Cod, and at that time, I was an administrator so we were there from like June eighth, until after Labor Day. We didn’t Horowitz 48 even have to come back to school until after Labor Day, and then the kids would come the week after Labor Day, because at boarding school we had—at Groton School, we had classes six days a week, we had Saturday classes as well. So, when you have six days a week, and you only need 180 days, it’s only thirty weeks, it goes very fast, so we have long vacations and so forth because we could count the Saturday’s as school days, and so
I started tutoring, and I tutored probably for ten years in the summers, and I would have four or five kids a day come in to be taught math, and the reason they were coming was because they had parents who valued education and wanted these kids to be successful in their courses and who had trouble in math. So my challenge was to figure out, okay, how am I going to say it to this kid so that they know? And for whatever reason, I was able to quickly figure out what their challenge was, and then be able to zero in on helping them fix it. I tutored kids who were taking SAT’s and a lot of the companies would promise I solemnly swear to raise your scores in math and English 100 points, I was able to do that with every one of my students because just coaching them on which problems to do or not do, how to pace themselves and then I would figure out three or four or five different things that they didn’t do well in math, and they would get back to me and say, “Mr.
Holden, my score went up 120 points in math, thank you very much” dah dah dah. And it was all again, a part of trying to figure out how to reach each student. I was always excited and passionate, I had fun with them, they’d come for an hour, then they’d leave, and I’d do it with them for maybe six weeks, seven weeks during the weeks, so they’d come six, seven, eight times during the summer, sometimes kids would come twice a week and part of it was being a psychologist, because you would sit down with them because they would say, “I hate school.” And we’d start right there, because they didn’t Horowitz 49 want to do anything, they’d be so angry that they had to be with me in the summer and they wouldn’t be able to be out playing. And we had to talk all through that and figure out why that was the problem and why weren’t they interested, and then I’d probably figure out that they did like learning, then they’d all these things and the family situation, and it was just unbelievable what you’d have to get through before you get to really working on the math, but again it’s getting to know each student and that’s what I’ve learned from the kids, is really what, how am I going to get it to you so that you’ll be able to maximize your learning in the interactive time that we have together so each, every teacher is somewhat of a psychologist, helping people with their problems and talking about, whether it’s the boyfriend-girlfriend thing, they hate their father their parents are getting a divorce and this is a big distraction and you can’t stand the new step mother, I mean all that stuff because that all blocks learning and when you’re anxious and you feel threatened, learning doesn’t take place. You just can’t be excited about it in the same was as when life is going along pretty well and you’re comfortable with your home life, with all your situation so that is a big part also of what we do. We have kids with those kinds of problems at St. Andrew’s, I mean what is it that’s blocking them from learning and it’s often just their personal situation. [52:25]
SH: In our culture, it is debated whether girls have the same math learning potential as boys. Others argue that women are not represented in math and science because they do not have the aptitude. From your perspective, are girls equally able to function in math?
Horowitz 50
JH: Absolutely. Girls are absolutely the same and girls as a matter-of-fact are more diligent and willing to put in the time and the aggressive hours. Oh my gosh, I have two daughters and a son, I ran a boys dorm, my wife and I ran a girls dorm, and the difference between boys and girls—there’s a huge difference between boys and girls. And the brainpower, though, is absolutely there and available depending on how each person is willing to work at it. There is no genetic difference, somehow, biologically in any way between men and women and I’ve helped coach girls, because there was a lot of this during my career, there was a lot written about this early on, so when I was at Groton, and my first year at Groton School, Groton was all boys; it went co-ed in 1976, or 1975-
76. It was my second year there, and my wife and ran a boys and girls dorm after we got married for all the time that we continued to be there for six years, and it was a great opportunity for me because teaching girls really for the first time for me, because I had been at Fessenden all boys, and then at Groton, all boys for a year and then co-ed. And talking girls through as a math teacher, why aren’t you—what’s the problem? And again getting to know the kids and figuring out, “I’m afraid that the boys”—literally—“I’m afraid that they’re not going to like me as much.” And I said, “Who are you doing this for?” This is you teaching yourself so that you’re going to get to college. You have to learn the stuff. You have the power. You can do it. And just helping young women believe in themselves, and that was the key piece, and then they would be fine. As soon as they were able to release themselves from the male oh my gosh, I shouldn’t make the male look bad, I can’t be better than them, they’re not going to like me or want to go out with me or any of that. Incredibly powerful bright women at Groton School who have done amazing things, same as the women at St. Andrew’s now. All the way through when Horowitz 51
I had my two years at Georgetown Day, I know they were successful because I as a teacher believed in them and encouraged them and hopefully inspired them to do great things. [55:19]
SH: That’s good to know. In my research, I found the following information: “This effort to make mathematics more interesting has remained prevalent since the movement began.
It started in the nineteen-sixties, and since then math textbooks have been growing in size and numbers.” Is there too much breath in these textbooks, yet not enough depth in order for students to achieve a level of mastery from these textbooks?
JH: Here’s the deal. I started in 1972, and there was this—I can’t remember—I think it was Holton Mithlan and they created the Dulcheone, and it just happened to be a woman who’s name just happened to be affiliated—it was the exact same algebra textbook, updated periodically, but not greatly. They took all of the white names and put Hispanic names in there to make it multicultural. Same math, so they changed the word problems so that it was “Carlos” and “Maria” instead of “Tom” and “Ann” doing whatever in the word problem, okay? Those kinds of things happened through the multicultural—the change in the math hasn’t really, didn’t really happen from the textbooks that I used until the last six, seven years, where they have now created electronic textbooks in coordination with the actual hard cover books, and I think there have been some good changes in that way because of the technology and the availability of having online texts and then the kinds of reinforcement that the computer offers and technology offers that was not there before. So, in terms of the material, it hasn’t changed, and we were Horowitz 52 teaching it to males and females all the way through. They did make the books more female friendly, because they got some people to put some female pictures in there, instead of all males, especially when they were showing pictures of people on the jobs. I mean, so they did those kinds of things, which were absolutely appropriate, and should have been done so that it should reflect our culture, whether it’s the diversity of our culture or just the male-female aspects of it, but the math itself, even what’s in there now, it’s still the same problem solving that’s going on. You’re trying to get information, using math as the language for people to have to think and figure out stuff, and being a problem solver and using math as the vehicle for problem solving, has been what’s excited me, but what you’re trying to do is get people to be thinkers and problem solvers. [58:11]
SH: Exactly. So I know you said that technology has effected education in general, but how in your opinion has it affected mathematics?
JH: It has released people from having to do a lot of busywork so that more problems can be solved, and thus you have more repetition, and the practice of the thinking and actually doing problems. In 1972, at Christmas, my first year of teaching in ’72, ’73, my girlfriend at the time, gave me the first Texas Instrument calculator that was made, and all it could do was add, subtract, multiply and divide. Few years later, the first scientific calculators came out, which had the orders of operation. In other words, you could actually punch in and start doing algebra problems, and the math—huge debate about whether, and it’s still somewhere out there, and I have colleagues—Ms. Stevens, who comes in, is an absolute advocate against the calculator, when I first came because it Horowitz 53 allowed you not to have to memorize the math facts. Two plus two is four. I mean if you create a matrix of all of the numbers zero to nine—those are all of the known numbers there are—and put them on each side, and put a plus up here, and then, or put an “x” there for multiplication, those are the math facts. I have known all what those add up to.
Nine plus nine is eighteen, nine times nine is eighty-one, if you needed to know ten times five, I mean, those are pretty easy, but once you get to eleven, oh my god, eleven times eleven is one-hundred-twenty-one, felt that if kids did not have to memorize all of that, then that was a bad thing somehow. Somehow, I released myself very quickly from that; I guess I’ve always been a forward thinker. As soon as something comes along, I say yes use it, because it can help people who might not be able to remember the math facts really well, so allow them to use the calculator. And then the graphing calculators came and then the power of being able to see how functions work by graphing them and so forth, it just helps so much. Now, I still haven’t personally decided that making the child do the graph by plotting the points on the carteegian plain versus just punching in some coordinates and plotting it. But as soon as you start to do lines of best fit and you start to pick graphs to see how in science, and your data base pieces, and this is how taking the technology and using it to be applied to actual real life problems, the technology is just fabulous to young people because you can accomplish so much more and see stuff in a way that you couldn’t before. And it has really, not revolutionized, but it has made it so that young people are able to do problems much more sophisticated problems in high school than what they used to be able to do before. [1:00:54]
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SH: Well, that covers the next question, what is your view on the calculator, because you like it.
JH: Absolutely, I’ve liked it from the very beginning and when I would tutor kids in the summer, and they didn’t know the math facts, I actually pushed kids because some mental math can help you out in a problem, especially even now, you still have to write your answers out and show your work, you can’t just put an answer down, because we want to know what your brain is doing, and whether you truly understand the thinking process that leads you to that answer. So mental math, and knowing that six minus two is four, don’t make a careless mistake, because two times three is not five, that’s two plus three, and three times two is six, and you’ve got to remember that it’s six, not five, because again, careless errors, I talked to you about that case study with that one boy, who eliminated them not totally but just by concentrating more deeply and really paying attention to it, all of the sudden, he was doing much better. And the exactitude of math, you see, helps people be precise and forces you to have to think in a very logical and systematized way, which is good, because organized thinking, and being able to problem solve and follow certain patterns and sequences is a very important attribute for somebody to learn, and math allows that to happen. [1:02:52]
SH: There are other countries whose students do a lot better in math on standardized tests. To what do you attribute that gap?
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JH: Time. Time is the prize we joke about that at St. Andrew’s all the time, that the more time you give to something, the better you’re going to be at it. The more sitting around the dining room table and talking with adults, and language acquisition, you are better at the language. The more time you give to reading, and you make yourself read books, you make yourself a better reader. The more time you put into math and doing math problems, and it is naturally, naturally you become a better math student over time. I think though, also, one of the difficulties in the United State, and I’m going to talk about a bias that I have that I believe is the case. Many elementary school teachers, still tend to be females who had bad math experiences, going back to that math thing, and they went into education, because they weren’t real strong in math, but they ended up having to teach math, they don’t like doing it , so they don’t give as much time to it, to the kids, and so the kids coming through, especially through the public school system, wind up not learning math as deeply as in other countries where maybe things are, I don’t know, maybe their elementary school teachers are different, but having at least put more emphasis on giving more time to mathematics in their education. From what I understand and from what I read. I’ve never gone and visited, and never gone and watched other teachers in other countries; I’ve never had that opportunity teaching mathematics so it is simply my, again, reading of this kind of thing, and thinking logically that that probably is the case, and I can even remember that about some of my teachers, but I was lucky enough to have a male teacher in fifth grade, and a male teacher in sixth grade, and they were really good, and we put a lot of time into the math, and all those math facts, and adding, subtracting, multiplying dividing, all of the whole numbers and the decimals and the fractions, and all that you need to then use when you get to algebra to problem solve Horowitz 56 and I think it’s part of it is simply the comfort level of the teachers of younger kids with math and the amount of time then that they put in because they’re more comfortable putting in less time than more time. [1:05:37 ]
SH: That’s true. What are the impediments to teaching students to be strong in math?
JH: What are the impediments? I think it’s just there, again, we all have a natural inclination to what is easier and more enjoyable. Every person has that, and I’ve always tried to make everybody feel comfortable with math, and this is where, I guess learning vulnerability where for me it was language acquisition and learning the French language and to be able to think it and be able to think in that language, same with the English language, and the fluency of that language, helping somebody with that math and being fluent with the math language is some it’s continual. Some people are very poor down here, and very great up here, and you’ve got your bell shaped curve of the human beings out there, which is just the way life is, and when you have people who are at the math anxious end of the bell shaped curve, you as the teacher trying to help them overcome that anxiety and have them become confident hopefully and believe in themselves, and that’s where all the tutoring that I did, and it’s, this is where it’s so hard in our society because we have this one size fits all, you have to learn math, English, history, science, language, and then we throw in a few other things at our school, like health and those kinds of things, but it’s all about reading and writing and then being able to do the arithmetic and the problem solving, and we’re trying to do that with every brain the same way, but not every brain is adaptive to the system the same way, and that’s what makes it Horowitz 57 a challenge. So you have your kids that have writing vulnerabilities, and reading vulnerabilities, you have students who have their math vulnerabilities, and so much of the math vulnerabilities are reading vulnerabilities when you get down to it. As I said before, and analyzing each student to figure out, “Okay, what’s the problem? What’s the anxiety? What is causing the difficulty in why they can’t learn math?” focusing on that, and that’s the greatest challenge, and that is the piece that’s always been the most exciting obviously for me because I’m a math teacher, and not just teaching math, it’s trying to figure out the psychology of the child, and how the child’s brain works so that then you can adapt and help show them that they can be successful in math by reaching them once you figure all that out. [1:08:15 ]
SH: Exactly. What are the benefits, I know you mentioned this a little bit earlier, but to teaching at an independent school?
JH: The great thing about teaching at an independent school is basically, you’re given the book, and you know what you need to accomplish by the end of the year, and you’re really left to yourself, how you’re going to get from point A to point B. You create your own lessons, you make up your own tests, and yes, every textbook has quizzes that have been made up for you and tests that have been made up for you, and I’ve always used those to pick problems, but over the years, I’ve figured out which problems are the most challenging for students and why. And those are the ones that I put on there to get them to try that level of sophistication, and the independence of being able to decide that myself, and I would love working hard, and love being creative in making up my won Horowitz 58 tests and quizzes and my own assessments so that I can challenge the students in the best way, and make it appropriate so that there is—I’ve said to kids, they all say, “Well, how do you figure out what problems?” I say, “Well, I figure out that if you really work hard and aggressively, I pick problems so that you get—let’s say there are ten questions and you get eight of them right, so that you’d at least get an eighty—the last two are going to be the ones that are going to have a little deeper thinking.” And you might get some points, because I always give you some points, so you get up to the eighty-eight, but you want the A though, you have got to then really know how to do those prepared problems and I design my tests and quizzes purposefully with that in mind, so that I’m challenging the real excellent natural ability students, so that they have some problems that they are going to have to really work at as well as the other kids. It’s, I love doing that, and I will,
I have always and if I were teaching now, I’d be doing the same thing. I spend hours and hours trying to put together lessons that will be helpful to reach all the brains in the classrooms, and the assessments that are going to reach them all as well. [1:10:29]
SH: Do you belong to any associations or memberships that allow you to keep abreast of developments in your study of mathematics?
JH: yes. There’s the Mathematics Teachers Association, and I’ve been a member of that since I started teaching back in 1972. They have monthly journals and they have problems in them; they have a problem of the day for every day of the month. For all the years that I have them, those problems of the week that we have in math, when I used to make them up, when I was a math teacher, I would go to the Mathematics Teacher, Horowitz 59 which was the actual name of the journal. It’s the National Association of Mathematics
Teachers. The NC—National Council of teachers in mathematics—NCTM. I’ve been a member of that organization my entire career as a math teacher. I read their journals and keep up with an abreast about thoughts about teaching, and I’ve done that my entire life as an educator. [1:11:30]
SH: Is that the only organization you’re a member of?
JH: As a math teacher, yes. There is another math organization, but I figured one is about as much time as I had. You’ve got to remember, Sarah, time is the prize and I sit there and I read that journal, right there, while I’m biking so that I’m trying to always do two things at the same time. Although, they say the brain can only do one thing at one moment, but you can exercise your muscles and read and use your brain at the same time.
So that’s where I do some of that reading and it’s just impossible. You can’t have four or five different sets of journals, because there’s not going to be enough hours in the day to do it.
SH: No.
JH: You can’t.
SH: Especially keeping a job.
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JH: Yeah. Yes. I’ve always felt that part of the job is continuing to educate myself so that I’m abreast of what’s happening in mathematics teaching and learning and in just education in general. I am a member of the National Association of Independent Schools, and they have a journal, I get and that comes out quarterly—I think it’s four times a year now—and they’ve had some great articles about just independent schools in general and the themes and the directions and you know, what are the things that you should be doing if you would like to be like St. Andrew’s, we’re at the very top because our school is excellent. We have great, great educational leaders and people who are committed to continuing to educate themselves and to grow, and that’s why it’s such a great learning environment. And we find people who love working with kids and then have that passion about stuff, and it just creates a great place. [1:13:10]
SH: How, in your opinion, has teaching change since you were a student to when you started teaching?
JH: As I was saying before how the brains have begun to change in that the attentiveness of the students and keeping them excited about whatever’s happening, you’ve got to change the number of learning opportunities during the forty minute class period, where I used to have a warm-up, I would teach something for about ten minutes—the warm-up would be about five minutes—trying to bring back and remember stuff previously learned. We would go into something new. I would teach it, talk about it, and then connect the warm-up to it. Then we would go and review problems, and then I try to review at the end. There was never enough time to get through all of the examples that I Horowitz 61 wanted to, just from reading one section of the text. And now when I have taught, there are, I switched from one thing to the other more often because of all the stuff that I’ve studied. The brain after nine minutes of focusing on the same thing, you’re starting to lose people in attentiveness. So you want to do something for five minutes and then change it so that then, oh okay that’s something a little different. But it’s hard when you’re having to go over and re-work problems or teach somebody how to do problems because you have got to just keep going over it and part of the challenge that I always say to kids even back when I was first working with kids, I’d sometimes give them the
“You’re not working hard enough” lecture, and this is guys, part of this is I’m putting out and trying to get you guys excited about this, because it is your responsibility as a learner to have your brain continue to be engaged and I would say, “I know, I’ve gone to workshops, they say after ten minutes, your brain starts to fade, and I know that I am going to sound, but at the same time, you can push yourself too, but I know it’s tough because throughout the whole day, every teacher is asking this of you, and your brain is going to get tired, and so forth, but right now, you’re not working enough and putting enough time into math for yourself to learn the math. You’ve have got to put more time into math.” And so, we would have those heart-to-hearts on occasion, and just try to give them the big picture understanding. As a teacher I was always teaching them the math, but also trying to educate them about everything they had going on in their lives so that it made sense, and that we are trying to educate you in this liberal arts education, where you got your English, your history, your science, your math, and your language, so that you are well equipped thinker and problem solvers. I am using math, the English teacher’s using English, the French teacher’s using French, you are doing the same thing in every Horowitz 62 single one of these courses, but you’ve got to push yourself so that you give enough time and that’s where we ask for a lot of time from you guys, and that’s where sleep is deprived, and we should probably get more, and trying to balance all that, it’s just a lot because there’s so many pieces that we’re trying to put into this every single day, to get your brain to the place where you’re the most well educated person possible. [1:16:24]
SH: And that’s hard because there’s only like forty-five minutes in each class—
JH: Exactly
SH: —every day.
JH: Yup. There’s actually only forty minutes. Forty-five would be great, it’s just those extra five minutes would add up to be a lot. We have forty-minute class periods, or eighty-minute class periods and I’ve taught at schools with fifty-minute class periods, and it’s much different.
SH: Fifty?
JH: Fifty minute class periods! You’d have seven of those, because we didn’t have advisor period, we didn’t have all these different things that we use time for and you get more done. [1:16:55]
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SH: It adds up. Also, since you’ve become a teacher, there have been numerous educational discoveries, how have they affected your teaching?
JH: All the time, because I, as I have said, read journals and books and continued to grow as an educator, taking whatever was the current theory or ideas and applying them and I want to applaud myself because I think I’ve done really well at helping lead St.
Andrew’s as one of the administrators in that way, and just the students that I’ve had to teach myself over the years, so constantly working at taking the best of what is new and coming from those deep thinkers out there. It’s really interesting though, because this goes back to the Milton Academy head of the math department when I interviewed there said, “and where are you going to learn how to teach?” because you have these people who, philosophically, they make stuff up, and they’re not really teachers, they’re not in the trenches day after day, working with kids. They think up stuff, they do research, but it doesn’t truly connect to day-to-day stuff. And that’s what we’re trying to do through our
Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning, is to truly get the research and those people who are out there doing them and actually getting it into the classroom with students, because educators and those philosophical people especially in schools of education who are coming through and saying, “Oh, and this is what’s best for kids.” But then aren’t every day-to-day trying to have that happen in the classroom with kids. It just, it doesn’t come together, so you have got to pick and choose, because some of the stuff out there, it just isn’t the way it works with human beings and the way their brains, yeah, to some extent, but not completely and that’s where I think i have been good at making it Horowitz 64 practical for people and able to give to them the essentials and reach them in a way that is going to match their learning, which again, is getting to know—
SH: Getting to know every student.
JH: Yup. [1:19:19]
SH: This is an interesting one. Every year, you present the student body with your famous “Fresh Start Speech.”
JH: That is correct.
SH: What were the circumstances around writing that speech and delivering it for the first time?
JH: You know. It’s a very interesting question because I though about that, and I think back about, “Okay, what was the thing that made me now be the way that I am philosophically?” but it took years, I don’t think I ever just all the sudden one year had the “Fresh Start Speech,” I just, it’s developed of what it is now, but it took me a while as a learner to figure out “Wow, okay, number one: the only person you can control is yourself, number two: you are the one then who has to make choices about yourself, and
I’ve said this to kids all the time, and that’s the ‘okay, if you really want to eliminate those careless errors, it’s up to your brain, not mine, you decide if you really want to do Horowitz 65 it, if you do that then your grade’s going to go up from a D to a B,’” and the “Fresh Start
Speech” was simply laying it out to people, here you are at the beginning of the year, most people are excited about coming back to school, and I try to use common sense, you know, that’s the way I feel as an educator, I love coming back every year, and having a new group and new students that I’m teaching, and new teachers to work with and help them develop and grow as teachers and the kids as well, and so the “Fresh Start Speech” was just a part of what I believed in and then I guess I’ve given it every year in some form, since I’ve been at St. Andrew’s. The form that it comes out in right now, look at that person to your left, then the one to your right, and those are the people who are going to release you or not release you, because they’re going to want you to be the same way you used to be, but you’ve got to let yourself just be you and so you’ve got a responsibility to yourself but also to your friends to allow them to have their fresh starts, and all of that stuff has taken me a while to get to that kind of place. And thinking about it and reflecting on it, so it wasn’t instantaneously there, but the central cornel was there and it’s just gotten a little more sophisticated and a little more well articulated as the years have gone on. [1:21:38]
SH: Mhmm. And has your take away from the speech changed at all?
JH: No, not at all. I believe in it one hundred percent that you’re in control of this is why
I say “make it a great day” instead of “have a great day.” When you have a great day, the day, you’re just letting it kind of control you. When it’s make a great day, and you’re working actively at thinking about how you are going to take and use your time, which is Horowitz 66 the prize, and are you going to work hard at your education or not? Which is what St.
Andrew’s is all about, and all the schools that I’ve worked at, and for me, I think for all of us as human beings, I mean it’s just to be successful, you have to believe in yourself and be in control of your decisions and how you’re going to go about doing it. And that’s philosophically where I come from all the time. [1:22:32]
SH: Do you imagine you will continue teaching and your work in education even through your retirement?
JH: Probably in some form. I think I want to do more in terms of offering myself to help other people, volunteering to help those a little less fortunate, maybe older people, which
I guess I’m going to be and am already, but I’m a young-older person, I mean I can help some of those older-older persons, so that at sixty-five and seventy, I can still help people who are seventy-five and eighty, and so forth. I may go and do some teaching with young people, the only thing there is you get locked into a school schedule, and if I were to start teaching a course at a school, even just one, you have got to be there every day, and I wouldn’t be, and it doesn’t give you the kind of freedom and flexibility that right now I want, which is to be able to experience the world during times when school is in session and people are working actively at their jobs, and that there aren’t quite as many people traveling around in Europe and in other places that I really want to go and explore, so I can educate myself about those things. [1:23:44]
SH: Sounds like a really fun retirement. Horowitz 67
JH: Yeah. It’s going to be a good thing.
SH: If there is any topic that I did not cover or that you want to discuss, feel free to let me know right now, or you can call me later.
JH: The other one that, see, I pushed, which I have not done a lot of recently is that goes back to time and trying to help young people understand that “okay, we have twenty-four hours each day and in that twenty four hours there are four basic things that we have to use that time with.” Number one is relationships and loving relationships with other human beings, and why are we on this earth other than to have loving relationships with other human beings? As we work so hard to educate ourselves, and don’t give ourselves social time, although we try to, and we squeeze it in with text messaging or whatever we’re doing, little bits and pieces, but relationships is like why we’re here. Number two is staying healthy. I am a huge advocate of the sleep and the exercise and the eating properly so that you then are able to function as a human being, so that you are in control of yourself. The third is having a passion, something you look forward to and maybe you can’t do every day. With the fourth being the job of being the student right now or the job of whatever is the job, and balancing it all, so that over your twenty-four hours, this is the art form that I hope everyone who graduates from St. Andrew’s will have in place so that you are consciously deciding how you are using your time because that is the prize and that is what’s valuable and hopefully there is time like now during vacation, so that you can be with family and friends, and enjoy them because we’re going to step right back Horowitz 68 into the job on January sixth, I guess that’s the day we come back. Having people understand that as an educator is something that I have tried to help get people to realize throughout my career and want to do that and continue to do that if possible. [1:25:47]
SH: Wow. That gives me a lot to think about.
JH: There’s a lot to think about. Yes. And it’s been a great career for me, I’ve loved every minute of it, and it’s been fun for me to watch the changes, whether it’s the technology, your basic Texas Instrument, to the super graphing calculators that we have now, it can do so much stuff. The electronic things that we use in science and now all of you have your new computers available at your disposal to go find out any little thing at any given moment, I mean it’s just such a different world because of that, but it’s the same basic brain having to think through and decide, “is this a good thing that I’m doing for myself right now? Am I keeping myself healthy right now? Am I helping my family and others that rely on me right now?” We have all of that basic responsibility that we have as good human beings to be able to give to society to help others and not be selfish and just do things for us. [1:26:53]
SH: Well, I think that’s it, thank you so much.
JH: Sarah, thank you very much.
SH: You can always call me if you have any further questions. Horowitz 69
JH: I hope you don’t have to spend too man y hours, we just did a lot of work, I said a lot of things, and you have a lot of words to transcribe.
SH: It’s okay; it will be a fun process.
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Interview Analysis
During my interview with John Holden, who has been a teacher for 42 years, we discussed how teaching methods have changed throughout his career, focusing mainly on how technological advances impacted students, teaching, and learning. It is important to reflect on the improvements of teaching over the last four decades because education has changed drastically, becoming more adaptable to the needs of every student. This reflection process could help spur new ideas for educational advances. It is also important to have a personal recollection of the changes of teaching because it provides facts based on experience, not data. Although oral history can be bias, Mr. Holden’s experience as an educator provides an informative oral history about the changes in teaching over the last four years.
While oral history may express the same facts as history found in textbooks, oral history is unique because it tells personal stories of the events described online and in textbooks. Events described in textbooks detail only the bigger picture, highlighting the opinion and reaction of the general public. Sometimes sources such as newspapers fail to reveal both views of events; and, in some cases, they jump to conclusions. Oral history, on the other hand, is capable of not only providing facts about events that the historian lived through, but also explaining their unique experience during said events. Instead of providing a global conclusion about how teaching has changed over the past forty years, oral historians are able to provide detailed personal experiences, giving life to their story.
The interview with Mr. Holden reflects how teaching has revolutionized over the past four decades. During the interview, we discussed Mr. Holden’s early career and education, changes in students and teaching, changes in mathematics, learning Horowitz 71 disabilities, and the rise of technology. One of the most critical points in the interview discussed how technology has changed the way teachers educate their students. Mr.
Holden believes that technology has impacted mathematics in that it has “not revolutionized, but it has made it so that young people are able to do…more sophisticated problems” (Horowitz 53). However, technology, such as video games, has caused students to be less attentive and forced teachers to change the way they teach. In my interview with him, Mr. Holden remarked, “So we as teachers have to change things now because kids just don’t stay attentive. I mean, you’re literally in competition with the screen…the brains have changed and kids are less attentive and you as a teacher have to be more creative to help…make it exciting and fun for them, as exciting and fun as the video games” (Horowitz 46). Now, the challenge remains reaching and inspiring each student. Mr. Holden’ approach to teaching has remained the same, expressing his belief that “we just aren’t all made the same way, and so we had this ‘one size fits all’ educational system, and having the flexibility of being able to figure something like that out, I was pretty proud of myself”(Horowitz 22). Throughout this interview, it becomes apparent that Mr. Holden values the importance of education for all different types of learners.
This interview has historical value because it provides a direct account of how teaching has changed to accommodate to the needs of students in this day and age. It is important to analyze how teaching has improved, so that we can then learn how to improve it even more. It is also important to have information on this topic of how students have changed over the years from the perspective of a teacher who has taught for many decades, because then people have access to a real life explanation, instead of just Horowitz 72 these theorists. In the interview, Mr. Holden admits that “there are a lot of people and philosophies, psychologists and so forth…and I never remember how they’ve affected me, because again, it’s really just me analyzing how to reach each student”
(Horowitz 39). However, he does agree with Jerome Bruner’s theory that “a learner even of a very young age is capable of learning any material so long as the instruction is organized appropriately” (qtd. in Horowitz 27). He responded by stating: “I absolutely believe with what Jerome Bruner is saying in that anyone can learn anything if they have the desire. You have to have the desire and then the mental discipline to make yourself do the necessary work…whatever it takes” (Horowitz 27).
By reflecting on this interview, I was able to recognize where my strengths and weaknesses were. Thoroughly researching information for my context paper, I was able to gain basic knowledge about different teaching methods devised by early philosophers and detailed changes in how mathematics has changed since the 1970s. My questions were logical and relevant, which led to very interesting detailed answers. One area where
I struggled was the ability to plan ahead to prevent errors such as losing the recording.
After the interview was conducted and recorded on only one device, it disappeared from the device, only to reappear a few minutes later. This incident shows me that I must take care to make copies of all the material produced in this project, so I do not lose any of them.
Through conducting this interview, I learned the story of Mr. Holden, an educator of mathematics for over forty years, as well as many valuable skills. I feel as though I chose an interesting individual to interview because before this interview, I did not know much about teaching or about Mr. Holden. This interview taught me the importance of Horowitz 73 having a one-on-one conversation for over an hour, a skill Mr. Holden believes has been lost over the years of technological discoveries. I was able to gain new skills and improve on existing skills such as time management from conducting this interview. I also learned how to present myself in a professional and the skillful art of transcribing. Most importantly, I learned the life story of a very interesting forty-year educator and his understanding of how education has changed.
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Works Consulted
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Gallagher, Christina. "Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky." Psychology History. Muskingum College, May 1999. Web. 2 Dec. 2013.
Hassard, Jack. "Education is a Process of Living and Not a Preparation for Future Living." National Education Policy Center. N.p., 20 Nov. 2012. Web. 15 Dec. 2013.
Holden, John. Interview by Sarah Horowitz. Arlington, VA. December 28, 2013.
Horowitz, Sarah. Personal Interview with John Holden. Arlington, VA. December 28, 2013.
Keen, Ernest. A History of Ideas in American Psychology. Westport: Praeger, n.d. Print. McLeod, Saul. "Bruner." Simply Psychology. Simple Psychology, 2008. Web. 2 Dec. 2013.
"Jean Piaget." Simple Psychology. Simple Psychology, 2009. Web. 2 Dec. 2013.
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Woolfolk, Anita E. Educational Psychology. 7th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998. Print.